Tag Archives | Task

Andy Baio from Waxy.org was intrigued by his initial experience with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and wanted to know more about the people that participate in the service, including what they look like, and how much it would cost for them to reveal their faces.

To make the process easy, he fired up the Mechanical Turk and added a simple task to the queue: Upload a photo of yourself holding a handwritten sign that says “I Turk for…”, filling out why you turk.

At $.05 per photo, there wasn’t much response, but at $.25, the responses started to come in, and by $.50, he had a decent sized sample.

The results? 30 people total – 20 men and 10 women, almost all of which were white and in their 20s and 30s. 21 turk for money, and the other 9 turk for fun or boredom.

Call me an online gaming Newbie, but the concept of an Achievement Farming Server was news to me.

For those of you in the same boat, let me explain: In certain games like Team Fortress 2, items and weapons are unlocked only after a player achieves a certain number of achievements (milestones that mark goals or difficult tasks within the game). For those that can’t just wait to play through the game and earn the achievements like a normal player, Achievement Servers get set up with the express purpose of unlocking certain achievements for everyone playing.

Thus, though there might be two different teams playing, everyone is basically on the same team, and working together to earn achievements.

Need to kill 10 guys in 30 seconds?

Though this might be a tough task on a regular server, it’s easy on an Achievement Server when you have 10 volunteers join one team and then just stand still in a single spot while players on the opposing team take turns slaughtering the 10 opponents in one fell swoop like some sort of communal firing squad. Then, once everyone from one team unlocks that particular achievement, the roles are reversed, and it’s the next team’s turn.

Seem a little…unfair?

I thought so too, but apparently these types of servers are pretty common for games like TF2, as players are anxious to ‘earn’ their new toys and try them out.

Click the link to follow one man as he journeys through an Achievement Server for the first time, and witnesses the power, and the shame, of Achievement Servers firsthand.